Soon Condé found himself almost alone, but, with his back to a tree and kneeling on one knee, he continued to defend himself. His strength, however, was failing fast, and perceiving two Catholic gentlemen, d’Argence and Saint-Jean, to whom he had once been of service, he called out to them, raised the vizor of his helmet, and handed them his gauntlets, in token of surrender. The two gentlemen sprang from their horses, and with several others formed a circle round Condé, promising to protect his life with their own. Scarcely, however, had they done so, when Anjou’s guards passed by, and their captain, “a very brave and honourable gentleman, called Montesquiou,”[83] learning the name of the prisoner, wheeled his horse round, galloped up to the group, and shouting: “Kill! _Mordieu!_ Kill!” drew a pistol from his holster, and shot the prince through the head from behind, killing him instantly.[84] Thus died--“on the true bed of honour,” as Jeanne d’Albret expresses it--Louis I. de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, a man typical of his age and of his country, alike in his faults and his good qualities. If the former were, as we have seen, many and glaring, the latter were no less conspicuous. “In courage and in courtesy,” writes La Noue, “no one surpassed him. His conversation was eloquent, rather from nature than from cultivation; he was generous and affable towards all; he was an excellent leader in war, yet, at the same time, a lover of peace. In adversity he bore himself even better than in prosperity.” The battle of Jarnac was little more than a skirmish, for the greater part of the Protestant army had not been engaged at all, and its losses, except among the cavalry, were inconsiderable. The death of Condé, however, created a profound impression. The Catholic chiefs fondly imagined that, with his fall, the Huguenots would cease to be formidable, and their joy, in consequence, was extreme. A solemn _Te Deum_ was chanted at the Court and in every church in France; thanksgiving processions took place at Brussels and Venice, and the captured standards were sent to Rome, to be hung in St. Peter’s as a perpetual memorial. By the orders of the detestable Anjou, the body of the murdered prince was treated with the most shameful indignity. “The same night that the battle was fought, the Duc d’Anjou, pursuing the enemy, victoriously entered into Jarnac, whither the body of the prince was carried in triumph on the back of a miserable ass, to the infinite joy and diversion of the whole army, which made a joke of this spectacle, though, while he lived, they were terrified at the name of so great a man.”[85] For two whole days it lay exposed to the effects of the air and the vulgar insults of Anjou and his creatures, and was then handed over to Condé’s brother-in-law, the Duc de Longueville, who caused it to be interred in the ancestral vault at Vendôme.[86] CHAPTER VII